The art and research group “And-Or” from Switzerland released another interesting concept-game. Piksel Bacteria deals with Augmented Reality and the real world.

The concept is easy (and maybe not a game at all) – your mission is to “infect” as many pixels as possible with the “bacterium pikselum”. The bacteria breed, by looking at them with the iOS-camera. Give them food by taking them to an edge and start moving the camera along the edge. What I like about this concept is, that you do not need any QR-Codes or something other prepared, to step into the “Augmented Reality”-world, but that the “game” plays instantly from any phone in any environment.

Before “Piksel Bacteria” And-Or raised gameplay and reality questions in works like “Gamescape“, where the players input of the game results in architecture. Or Discrimination Pong, a work that raises questions about gameplay modifiers, asymmetric gameplay and discrimination.

Just stumbled upon this animated version of the still great book / project “How to survive a robot uprising by Daniel H. Wilson. It explains in shot, how to act on robots, if they get really hostile and out of control.

Yesterday I had the great opportunity to meet a delegation of the Broque-netlabel here in Cologne. Really nice guys, that still keep holding the free CC-music flag up! Broque is not only one of the oldest net labels meanwhile, but at the same time one of the netlabels, that convinces with their high quality output from release to release. The recently released album “The Atlantic Machine” form Auto-Pilot give a good example. An intense and personal album with remembrance to techno, electronic, songs, days and nights. A very clean production. Feel free to download this great music for free! (Here is the release page in German as well)

File-size still matters. Even in 2012. The JS1K is a demo-competition for doing amazing stuff in web browsers with JavaScript just under 1k in size. There is basically nothing more to say, but better just visit the site and browse the submissions! You can study the submissions-code as well.

Lately I came across this already Kickstarter-funded project, called “Spriter”. It is an “easy to use animation tool”, especially suited for game-designers. The tools uses a modular method of animation – instead of each frame being a single complete image, the frame is constructed from many small, re-useable images (for example body parts). Each of these images that are used to construct the full frame can be scaled and rotated to further increase reuse of content.

The developers at Brash Monkey promise, that with Spriter you can create robustly animated game characters and effects with a workflow that’s “highly intuitive, visual, and efficient for not only time, but also for the final game’s file and memory usage”.

Let’s wait and see, if there will be also a version available for OSX at any later time.

The German indie-games-scene try to get more indie – a part of the puzzle could be the Amaze Indie Connect 2012 in Berlin. The organizers want to become an international Indie Games Festival and meeting-place of the europäischen Indie Games Scene in Germany. There are talks, visions and for the first time a indie-gamedev price.

The project still ongoing crowdfunded at the startnext-platform. The money should go directly into the price-money for the games-devs – so feel free to support!

The Revision Eastern Party 2012 is over. The Demosceners once again made it happen to fantastically re-invent themselves. Look at some of the contributions to the party – fresh and innovative styles ahead!

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